Chapter 7
Oisín
I wake in Saint’s bed alone, sore enough that even breathing feels like something my body has to negotiate with itself before allowing.
For several seconds, I don’t understand where I am.
The room is too dark, too sparse, too unfamiliar, and the sheets smell like a man I’m still trying to convince myself I’m allowed to hate cleanly.
Then everything starts coming back from the initial meeting to Saint guiding me out of the room to his cock stuffed into my ass, that small part of me that needed this fully satisfied.
I keep my eyes closed for a moment and let shame move through me before I try to stand.
Fighting it only makes it louder. I should feel only horror about last night, and part of me does.
A sensible man would wake in a stranger’s bed after being traded into an alliance and used as leverage between two criminal organizations and know exactly what to call the thing that happened to him.
The problem is that nothing in me feels clean enough for one name. I’m angry. I’m frightened. I’m embarrassed so deeply I can feel it in my soul. I’m also calmer than I should be, and that calm feels like the worst betrayal of all.
Sitting up a little, I find the indent where Saint had been is cold, the sheets pulled back as if he left early and without hesitation.
That shouldn’t hurt, except that waking alone after everything feels too much like being discarded and too much like being spared, and both possibilities leave me lying very still under a ceiling I don’t recognize.
As I take another look around the room, I find a stack of clothes on the dresser.
The attached bathroom door sits half open, light already on, a towel folded on the counter beside a new toothbrush.
There’s no note. No explanation. No softness to make the gesture easier to understand.
Saint has provided what I need and left me to decide whether that makes him considerate or controlling.
With Saint, I’m starting to suspect the answer will almost always be both.
“Lovely,” I mumble to myself, pushing myself up onto weak legs. Frowning, I look down to the absence of crusted cum between my thighs and my stomach.
Further confusion wars with my curiosity as I realize the sheets I fell asleep against aren’t the same ones I woke up to. There’s no way a man like Saint…
Warmth floods through me at the idea of a man that brutal cleaning me up, but I quickly squash the emotion. I can’t get attached. I won’t be here long, whether it’s because the alliance breaks anyway or because Saint decides he’s done with me.
The shower helps a little, the hot water easing the stiffness in my muscles, but it also wakes every tender place his hands and mouth left behind.
I brace one palm against the tile and bow my head beneath the spray, breathing through the ache as it sharpens.
I try not to look down and catalog the marks.
That proves impossible once I step out and the mirror gives me back to myself in bright, unforgiving detail.
There’s a dark bruise beneath my jaw, another half-hidden near my collarbone, fingerprints fading along one hip.
My hair curls damply over my forehead, my mouth looks too soft, and the shirt Saint left slips off one shoulder no matter how many times I tug it back into place.
“Fantastic,” I mutter, because apparently humiliation is easier to survive when I narrate it.
Giving up, I move into the hallway. I pass three closed doors, a laundry closet, and a framed photograph of Obsidian members standing in front of a row of bikes.
Saint is near the center, younger by a few years but no softer, Sol beside him with a hand resting on his shoulder in a way that should look paternal and somehow looks strategic instead.
By the time I reach the main area, the clubhouse has already noticed me.
Nobody stops talking outright. The Rogues would’ve stared openly, laughed louder, made sure I understood I was being measured and found lacking.
Obsidian watches with more discipline, which makes it worse in a different way.
Voices lower as I approach. Eyes move, pause, and move away.
A prospect carrying a crate of clean glasses nearly clips the corner of the bar because he’s too busy pretending he hasn’t seen the mark beneath my jaw.
Two men at a table near the far wall cut off mid-conversation when I pass.
I keep walking because stopping would invite questions, and I don’t have enough answers for myself, let alone for a room full of men deciding whether I’m Saint’s mistake, Saint’s toy, or Saint’s strategy.
I follow the smell of coffee to the kitchen because my stomach is unsettled but my head is worse, and caffeine feels like the only socially acceptable form of self-defense available.
The kitchen is cleaner than I expected, with an industrial refrigerator, a scarred wooden island, mismatched mugs hanging from hooks above the sink, and a whiteboard covered in a list of ingredients.
Beneath that, in a much looser hand, someone else has added Demo banned from making bacon unsupervised, with a second note under it reading fire hazard in all caps.
I’m standing there staring at the board when a woman’s voice says, “He really is, too. Sweet kid, but give him a skillet and he turns breakfast into a federal incident.”
I turn too quickly, my body punishing me for it with a dull pull through my hips and thighs. The woman in the doorway notices. She’s much older, maybe even older than my father, dark hair crowded around her face.
Unlike the other members, she seems much more relaxed, a laundry basket against one hip, wearing an oversized Obsidian sweatshirt with sleeves shoved to her elbows.
“You’re Oisín,” she states. “I’m Tally.” She steps past me as if the kitchen belongs to her more than it belongs to the club, sets the basket on a chair, and reaches into the cabinet for two mugs.
“Coffee’s in the pot unless Bricks got there first. If he did, it’ll taste like burnt tar and a bad childhood. ”
I blink at her. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Pour coffee?” She glances over her shoulder. “I’ve been pouring coffee for killers, idiots, and men with untreated childhood wounds since before you were old enough to shave, sweetheart. You’re not going to be the one who makes it awkward.”
A laugh slips out of me before I can stop it, an almost painful thing from disuse. Tally smiles as if she heard exactly what it cost me and has the decency not to mention it. She fills both mugs, adds cream to one, then pauses with her hand on the sugar jar.
“You take it sweet, black, or somewhere in the middle?”
“Cream is fine. No sugar, thank you.”
“Polite,” she says, sliding the mug toward me. “That’ll scare them more than if you came in swinging.”
I wrap both hands around the cup even though it’s too hot. The warmth gives me something to hold that isn’t myself. “I think I’ve already scared them.”
“Honey, Saint walking in with you instead of Varina scared them. You could’ve stood there reciting street names and gotten the same looks.” She leans against the counter with her own mug and studies me openly, but there’s no hunger in it, no agenda I can feel pressing behind her eyes. “You sleep?”
I nearly choke on the coffee. “What?”
“I’m not asking for details.” Her brows rise. “I’ve got eyes, and this place has walls thin enough to ruin a woman’s peace if she lets it. I’m asking whether you slept.”
“A little.”
“That means no.” She sets her mug down and opens the refrigerator. “Did you eat after?”
I don’t answer fast enough.
Tally makes a sound in her throat that says more than an entire lecture would have. “Sit down.”
“I’m not really hungry.”
“Oisín.” She says my name with a firmness that doesn’t bruise. “Sit down before you fall down and make these men feel useful.”
For some reason, that works. I sit at the island while she pulls out eggs, butter, and a wrapped stack of tortillas.
She doesn’t fuss over me, soften her voice into pity, or even ask whether I’m all right in the hollow way people do when they’d prefer the answer to be simple.
She just cooks. It’s such an ordinary kindness that I don’t know where to put it.
Hostility has rules. Cruelty has patterns. Kindness without a hook feels like someone opening a door in a room I didn’t know had one.
“Saint around?” she asks, cracking eggs into a bowl.
“I don’t know.”
“You’ll get used to that.”
“To not knowing where he is?”
“To him disappearing and expecting the building to remember he still controls everything.” She whisks the eggs hard enough to make the bracelet on her wrist click against the bowl.
“He had a warehouse issue before sunrise. Moth came through looking like someone had personally insulted the concept of logistics, so I’m guessing it wasn’t small. ”
“Moth always looks like that.” I say ‘always’ but I only met him once. Yet, watching him during that entire meeting, I had a feeling that was a permanent emotion on his face.
Tally points the fork at me. “See? Observant. That’s why half the men out there are nervous.”
I glance toward the doorway. “They’re nervous because I’m a Rogue.”
“They’re nervous because Saint claimed you in front of God, Sol, and everybody with ears, then left before explaining what the hell anyone’s supposed to do with you.” She pours the eggs into the pan, and the soft hiss gives me somewhere to look besides her face. “The Rogue part doesn’t help.”
The word claimed moves through me with the remembered pressure of Saint’s hand at my neck. I lift the mug and drink too quickly to cover whatever my face might be doing. “That’s… how do you know all that already? No, nevermind. I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing.”
“Saint always knows what he thinks he’s doing. Whether he’s right is the question.”
“That’s comforting.”